It's Earth Day 2023

It's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of.  Yes, even more than Kwanzaa.   

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless.  Plus, it's late.  The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong.  Everything here is factually correct. 

Earth Day, as most of you know, is a holiday first marked in 1970 at the start of the national environmental movement, inspired by the almost entirely discredited book Silent Spring.  Ira Einhorn is one of the main founders of Earth Day, if not the guy who started it.  Ira practiced what he preached: he murdered his girlfriend (less stress on the planet) and composted her body in his closet.  (Reduce, re-use, recycle!)

You won't find Ira Einhorn's name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.

Ira Einhorn died in prison April 3, 2020 as commemorated in the New York Times. It's my belief that another justification for Erf Day was probably the most thoroughly discredited and disproven book in history, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968.

First published in May of 1968, I recall it being talked about widely and seriously.  It was by a scientist after all.  The Stanford University biology professor famously claimed that population growth would result in resource depletion and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people.  I recall conversations about "hamburger wars" as people fought to the death for dwindling supplies of food.

Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

Last time I checked, England is still there - and India, too.  The number of people on the brink of starvation has been in continuous decline, although the recent attacks on natural gas (an important way to get fertilizer), may make that worse again.  The 15 years before the end of humanity was up in 1983.  Here we are 40 years later and the biggest threat to humanity is the ruling class running a script from this most thoroughly discredited and disproven book.

Let's face it: doomsday prophesy sells, and doomsday from someone with a handful of letters after their name (MS, PhD etc.) sells even better.  Ehrlich was just particularly bad at it.  He famously lost a bet where he picked a "basket of commodities" and bet that these five metals would go up in price in 10 years (1980 to 1990) - they declined in price an average of 57.6% while the  population increased.  Despite being so wrong on so much, he influenced generations of policy makers.

Earth Day is so old that when it started, the climate scare was a coming ice age, not "warming" or just plain "climate change" as they resort to now.  I don't want to get started on that because I could go hundreds of pages on how screwed up that narrative is!  Since it's not really tied to Erf Day, I won't.  

In celebration of Earth Day, then, just remember "nature wants you dead" (a close to home reminder).  Turn on the air conditioner (if you're in my part of the world, it has been on) or the heater.  Burn some charcoal and a hunk of cow or pig.  Turn on all the lights in your house.  Start a big bonfire in your back yard.

“Remember, it doesn't count unless the lights can be seen from Proxima Centauri.” 

This column was written entirely from recycled electrons.  No electrons were wasted, disposed of or even inconvenienced.